The Book (26 page)

Holden set down his glass, looked back and, for the first time in years, saw the Eve he knew as a child. Soft, precious, gracious and kind hearted, but most of all, fragile. The news he had just delivered had launched her mind into a realm it was never prepared to go, and it frightened her. But, at the same time, he saw the new Eve. The one that plotted and contemplated. The one that was able to get half of his paycheck and possibly sole custody of their daughter. As each second passed, she was taking steps to protect herself. He could see the battle behind her ebony lashes and hazel eyes. She was already compromising. Telling herself that she shouldn’t believe because believing meant change and change wasn’t always a good thing.

I mean, look around, Eve
, she was thinking.
You just got your life back in order.
The carpet guy just finished three days ago
.

Holden knew Eve had been wondering what would happen if she listened any further. He was wondering the same thing. How would her life be altered if he read another passage? Would she be able to stop from caring? Would she unknowingly welcome the change that would kill the
new
Eve? This was precisely the thought that forced her to place her hand on Holden’s knee. She couldn’t allow herself to hear any more.

This was an important moment in her life. Holden saw the moment in drips of seconds and he knew exactly what to say.

He took a breath before beginning.

“Eve, do you remember when we were dating…when you first told me about what had happened to your grandmother? Do you remember where we were that day and how…?”

The phone rang.

Eve, limp and vulnerable, didn’t hear it until the second ring. Then, as if her heart were suddenly pierced with a syringe of adrenaline, she fell from the stool, pivoted on her heels and dove for the rattling cell phone. In one long word, she spat, “
Sorry-Holden-I-have-to-take-this
.”

Holden relaxed his shoulders. He smiled. It hadn’t taken long to break through the ice, to breach its hard, cold exterior, and he was proud for making himself susceptible enough to failure. Watching Eve skip into the next room, he pictured her and Jane at Winston’s and, for a moment, felt a tinge of guilt. How would Marion feel? What would this do to his relationship with her? Not that they were in a relationship, because they weren’t, but there had been something going on between them, hadn’t there? How would they relate to one another with his ex-wife in the same room? Marion couldn’t leave. And if Eve were suddenly over all the time, how would Marion feel? Oh, but Jane. If he could see Jane everyday, how special everything would be.

Knowing she was only a staircase away, Holden left the room to find his daughter, gripping the log book with confidence. He navigated the hallways and up the stairs to the one room he had missed more than any other; but when he reached the threshold, he felt as if he’d been in a coma for the past four years. Everything had changed. Her bedroom was different. The furniture, the paint on the walls, the animals on the bed. Different without Dad. He wondered what choices Jane had made on her own and which ones Eve had orchestrated.
What else could he expect? He never comes over anymore.

When he came to pick up Jane (when he remembered to pick her up) he pulled his van into the driveway and waited. Normally, Eve dropped her off at the toothpaste house he called home. Whenever she was over, he made the bed for her and placed out the one stuffed animal he had bought at a filling station so she could have a friend to sleep next to. But, without fail, they always ended up in the living room – him in his easy chair, her on the couch and the stuffed animal somewhere amongst the folds of her blanket. Jane would have preferred the comforts of his bed to the coils of his couch, but she never wanted to leave his side. He hoped that love of Daddy would never fade, but her bedroom was telling him different. It was the room of a young girl on the way to young womanhood.

Holden was suddenly longing for the days and hours he had missed out on. How he wanted those back. How he would change things if he could.

Jane caught him in the corner of her eye. She pulled her headphones from her ears and spun, her cropped curly hair bouncing as she shined a bright smile and leapt out of her desk chair to hug him once more. “Daddy, I didn’t hear you. Why were you waiting at the door? You could have come in.”

“Well…” he said, kissing the crown of her bushy head. To his nose, which often carried the stench of pipe dope laced with threading grease, she still smelled like a newborn. “I didn’t want to interrupt you.”

She reached for his hand and he gave her the left, awkwardly. Although the branding iron had cooled rapidly after shutdown hours prior, he didn’t want to take any chances with his baby. Jane led him to her new desk (it had the wear and tear of a few years which meant that it was only new to him - another reminder of how much he had missed), and showed him pictures that she had drawn with her digital sketch book. Intricate sketches of animals with bodies that swirled into lines and odd three-dimensional shapes. She forced him to admire each one independently and put him on the spot to hear his artistic assessment. Every time that he said,
“How pretty,”
she would interrupt him with a tilted head of disappointment. Holden just adored the way she would say,
“Dad,”
by breaking the name down in two, distinct vocal registers.
Da-ad
was a rollercoaster drop from high to low. After such drama, he would then, of course, over-elaborate until she rolled her eyes, shook her head and scrolled on to the next picture.

When they were finished studying her newest drawings, Jane tugged him over to her bed where he had left the digital log book and pulled her backpack up to his lap. He admired the many patches that danced irregularly along the straps and between the zippers as she scrounged for something important to show him. His smile faded when he saw what it was. Jane took out a very compact, very sleek version of The Book. His joyous occasion with his daughter suddenly became a stark, hope-drifting nightmare as Holden was gifted with an evocatively honest realization. Jane was still reading The Book. Of course she was. Every day at school.

Holden watched as she flipped it open without fear and, with a sharpened pointer finger, swirled rapidly through the menus on the ever-bland screen. There were swoops, taps, double taps and then, as if by magic, a story by Charles Dickens was upon them. And Jane, his trusting, pure, faithful daughter, was telling him all about the characters that he knew so very well.

“I know how much you love Dickens, Dad,” she piped, rolling through the chapters.

“Yeah,” he said, slowly accepting the sorrow of what was before him.
He did love Dickens, right? Or was it Ann O. the Editor’s best friend that he liked?
Maybe his favorite lines had simply been nothing more than her subcontracted transitions. He didn’t love the words of Charles Dickens. He loved The Book’s abridged interpretation of Charles Dickens. He loved only what they wanted him to love. Holden stopped listening to her questions in the shock of such a thought. Jane noticed when he stopped commenting. Then she saw that his fingernail wasn’t as sharpened as it normally had been and went to inspect it. That was when it happened. The catalyst that brought on the most memorable moment in the rest of his daughter’s life.

The screen went dark.

The recycling icon of The Book appeared for a moment, animating, until it dissolved peacefully and the words
Update in Progress
swam in pixels to the screen in a nondescript script. Holden’s jaw slackened and he reached for The Book, while his daughter muttered, “Awhh, I hate it when this happens. It’s like all the time now, right? That must annoy you, Daddy.” Jane’s eyes trailed down to his finger again. It hadn’t been left unsharpened. His fingernail had been clipped. Retracted back to the level of the others. Her father was wearing a declaration of the non-reader. “I know how much you love The Book.”

Jane watched as his face slowly tightened, his teeth grinding below clenched lips, his eyebrows knitting above the bridge of his once-busted nose. His grip on her Book grew so frighteningly strong that his knuckles were whitening. In the calmest manner imaginable, Holden drawled, “Where does your mother keep her copies of The Book?”

“Dad? Are you okay?”

“Jane. Answer me,” he said, his voice like steel in the quiet of the room.

“There’s two in the table beside her bed. And there’s another one that she tried to throw away last year. I think it’s the one you gave her, but…I took it out of the garbage. I’m sorry.” Based on the look in her father’s eyes, a look she had never seen before that frightened years from her life, Jane rambled off its location, along with the question she needed an answer to, in a single, hasty word. “
It’s-in-my-closet-on-top-of-my-sweater-why-is-everything-okay?
”

“No, Jane. Everything is not okay.”

Holden rose like a machine from the edge of her tiny bed with a single task to achieve before self-destruction. Without considering the delicacy of sliding doors, he tore them open and began rummaging wildly through her closet. The image of him wrenching sweaters off their shelves and shirts from their hangers welded itself to her mind, where it found a place to hide forever.

“Have I done something wrong, Daddy?”

“No,” he wheezed, finding the Book he had purchased for Eve on their first anniversary. He tossed it into the hallway, dropped to his knees and took Jane’s face in his left hand, repeating, “No, sweetheart. You haven’t done anything wrong. Daddy just needs to do this right now.”

Ravenous with the desire to destroy all the Books he could find, Holden sped into Eve’s bedroom and tore open her side table. He would not allow such blatant mind control to rest within thirty feet of his daughter ever again. He found the other two quickly and returned to the hallway for the third, where he stood at the top of the stairs, searching blankly for a solution. His eyes darted in every direction.

It couldn’t be water. Water simply wouldn’t do the trick anymore. Most hand held computers had an internal, waterproof sheet and drainage system to protect the logic board, hard disk and other components. Everyone knew that. Even if that system had been compromised, Eve could easily have the device fixed. And it would take too long to smash them. She could already be off the phone.

“Microwave!” Holden announced, like a mad scientist at the birth of a haunting discovery. He raced down the stairs with Jane at his heels and into the kitchen where he tossed the books onto the countertop, yanked open the microwave and threw them onto the lid of a defrosting casserole. The sound of them clanging and clattering against the inside made Eve race into the kitchen with the cell phone at her ear.

“Holden! What are you doing?”

“These Books are controlling you, Eve. You can’t have them in the house anymore.” He punched the keys for maximum power and pressed start. The reaction between the screens was instantaneous. Sparks scattered from behind the small window. A puff of smoke broke through the hinge of the closest spine. There came a random series of pops and suddenly flames were billowing from each of the plastic corners. Within seconds, the entire microwave was a cloud of brackish smoke and light from angry flames of neon green.

Eve dropped her phone and propelled herself toward the microwave. “Jane get out of here! Your father’s going insane.”

She began to cry. “Daddy?”

He turned and lowered himself to her level. “Everything’s fine now, Sweetie,” Holden whispered, as Eve erupted at the disarray, grabbed what was left of his water glass and launched it onto the molten remains. The liquid succeeded at dousing the flames, but the puff of acrid stink it sent to her face also met the smoke detector in the hall.

“What have you done?” she asked over the shrill scream of the alarm. “That was my mother’s Book, you jerk! I can’t believe you just did that!”

Holden grasped his daughter’s shoulders and leaned forward, locking himself in her eyes as he prepared to speak slowly and intentionally. Things were about to change. Eve was going to make him leave and he wouldn’t know when the next chance to tell his daughter about the Book would come. But as he prepared to explain everything as simply as he could, a noise came from the driveway. Doors were closing. Multiple doors. He peeked over at Eve and her face shifted. A small laugh escaped her mouth. And then she shrugged.

“What did you do, Eve?” Holden asked, fully aware that she had been downstairs, alone, for a long time. Slowly, he stood, his cautious, unblinking eyes judging her tightened body language. He pulled from it many familiar truths before asking the obvious. “Who did you call?”

A knock came at the front door. The simple confession of its aggressiveness confirmed all that she had done.

“You know…I…when you first started talking to me, you made a little bit of sense, but Holden, this is scary what you’ve done. And…you know what? You’re…you’re scaring me.”

“Eve,” Holden began, his face stripped of emotion in such immediate surprise. “You just killed me.” The unmasked honesty of his words disturbed her and, seeing a different man standing in her living room than the one she had married, Eve felt certain that he was telling the truth. “Do you realize what you have just done? To me. To yourself. To
our daughter?
Do you have
any idea what you’ve just done?
”

Holden lowered himself to his daughter for the third time. She was shaking with dread. As voices came to the door, he found, deep within himself, a calmness that was foreign to her and he brushed the fingers of his left hand over her ear. The people at the door were wrenching on the handle of the screen and Holden was grateful for unconscious deeds. He had been so used to locking the screen when he lived there, that the involuntary action had bought him some time. Well, it bought him half a minute.